Virginia's Dna Databank Hitting Jackpot

New Technique May Help Police Solve Dormant Cases

November 24, 1997|By The Washington Post

RICHMOND — Jerry Wyche forced a 26-year-old woman into a car at gunpoint, terrorized her as they drove around Richmond and then raped her in an abandoned shed in December 1993. A few months later, he struck again, raping a 10-year-old girl in the city. But police didn't know that Wyche, 32, was their man.

``The cases were cold,'' said Thomas Johnson, an assistant commonwealth's attorney in Richmond. ``He wasn't a suspect in either rape. He thought he got away with it. And it looked like he got away with it.''

More than two years later, a computer in downtown Richmond linked him to the attacks, which led to a conviction and a 25-year prison sentence. Wyche's case illustrates the potential of a coming revolution in the use of DNA databanks to solve crimes.

Wyche had been convicted of breaking and entering and grand larceny in Southampton County a year after the rapes. When he entered the state prison system in April 1995, his blood was drawn and shipped to an old, red-brick railroad building in Richmond, now the lab for the Virginia Division of Forensic Science.

A computer analysis at the lab already had linked the two rapes to one suspect by creating DNA profiles from semen taken from the victims. In March 1996, the computer kicked out Wyche's newly analyzed DNA as a match for the DNA in the unsolved rapes.

``Bingo, a hit,'' said Paul Ferrara, director of the Virginia Division of Forensic Science. ``DNA is becoming an important investigative technique, not just a scientific technique. Up to the development of databanks, police had to develop a suspect. Now we can develop a suspect for the police. And that's going to happen more and more.''

Since 1989, 48 states have created DNA databanks. The idea is similar to fingerprint files: Obtain DNA profiles of all felons, store them in computers, and then compare DNA profiles created from crime scene evidence against the DNA of the felons.

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a complex molecule that is found in the nuclei of human cells and carries a person's genetic information.

Unlike fingerprint systems, many of which are incompatible with one another, the DNA databanks are being built so they can be fully integrated among local, state and federal agencies.

Although the state databanks have been around since Virginia created the first in 1989, their crime-solving potential has been largely unrealized. DNA technology was slow, and it took up to six weeks to create a DNA profile. In Virginia, one of the most aggressive databank states, only 10,000 of the 150,000 blood samples drawn have been profiled. And in the rest of the country the backlog is just as bad.

That is all about to change.

The development of a new DNA technology, called ``polymerase chain reaction-based DNA testing at short tandem repeat loci,'' means that profiles can be turned around in 48 hours. Also, using the new method, forensic scientists only need a tiny amount of biological evidence, such as a tiny blood spot or even some perspiration on a headband, to build a profile. Using the old technology, called ``restriction fragment length polymorphism,'' scientists need sizable amounts of biological evidence, such as a bloodstain the size of a quarter.

``We can clear the backlogs and profile all felons, and we can process more crime-scene material,'' Ferrara said. ``This opens things up on two fronts.''

Because of the backlog, the fact that blood from Wyche was profiled was more happenstance than design; the blood could just as easily still be sitting in a freezer in Richmond.

``What bugs me is that because of the backlog, we are going to come to find out that we could have prevented crimes,'' Ferarra said.

Since 1993, Virginia has had 25 DNA matches, and Ferrara said he is expecting at least 600 more hits in the next three years as new technology comes on line.

With a high repeat-offense rate and no suspect in as many as one-third of all reported rapes, law enforcement officials believe they can solve thousands of otherwise-cold cases. Moreover, they say, rapists often start with lesser crimes such as burglary. If their DNA is in the databank, some criminals can be incarcerated before they become serial offenders. Virginia officials also plan to re-examine old cases using the new technology.

The emerging system already has survived court challenges, including a Virginia case that went to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Lawyers for six Virginia prisoners argued that drawing their blood for DNA violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unlawful search and seizures.

According to Harold Krent, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, who argued the Virginia case, the court agreed that the state could not prove it had probable cause to justify the gathering of blood samples as evidence, but it ``concluded that the governmental interest in establishing a DNA bank eclipsed the interests of individuals,'' primarily because they were felons.

Krent and other constitutional lawyers believe that felon DNA databanks might become controversial if the state tries to compile data from other groups it suspects of having a disposition to commit crimes, uses the DNA for genetic research or fails to protect databank files from private interests such as insurance companies.